Perhaps some of you have a conservative uncle who says stupid things. You know, like the U.S. is not in debt to China, or that Barack Obama is a socialist or that George W. Bush won his presidential elections.
Mine recently repeated the Bill O'Reilly/Rush Limbaugh/Attila the Hun yarn about all the students and professors at UC Berkeley being flaming liberals. I tried to politely bring up the stuntmeisters known as the Berkeley College Republicans, who in 2003 famously held an Affirmative Action Bake Sale on campus, charging white students more per muffin than Latinos and African Americans.
“Nope,” Unc told me, “must've been a figment of your imagination.”
Okay, if he did not hear of the bake sale, which only made international headlines after all, he may be surprised to learn Berkeley's chancellor revealed in the British press that the College Republicans represent the largest student political club on campus.
“Yeah, tell me another, Red Emma,” replied my uncle.
How about Boalt Hall, the conservative-leaning UC law school, whose dean home of professor John Yoo, who worked in the Bush Administration, where he penned the famous torture memo that greenlit waterboarding and violations of the Geneva Convention before he returned to the UC Beserkely.
“What torture memo?”
]
Perhaps Uncle Knuckle-dragger can be dragged over to Chapman University, where Yoo is teaching while on temporary leave from UC You-Know-Where. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times (a.k.a. Pravda) blogs that Yoo may have come south to escape ultra-liberal Berkeley, where city
leaders branded him a war criminal and human rights activists erected
a billboard to denounce him.
Yoo
has denied Berkeley's liberal tilt had anything to do with his move
south, saying he just wanted to spend time on a smaller, newer campus,
to experience
living in Southern California, to tower over Jim Doti. Okay, I made up that last one.
But
local peace activists say they plan to give Yoo a little of the old
ultra-nonviolence, and guess who is egging them on? None other than
their lefty NorCal counterparts, who plan to come on down to join in
the yammerin'. The website FireJohnYoo.org has all the sordid details.
Bet my Unc will believe that.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.